Lisa Hilbink

Lisa Hilbink is a political scientist who left her professorship at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, to accept a three-year position in the highly competitive Safe Place for Science program at Aix-Marseille University in France, funded by the A*Midex Foundation, citing concerns about the future of academic research under the Trump administration.

Hilbink earned her BA in international relations from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1988, followed by her MA (1994) and PhD (1999) in political science from UC San Diego, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Princeton's Society of Fellows before joining Minnesota. Her research spans comparative judicial politics, comparative constitutionalism, Latin American and Iberian politics, democratization and democratic resilience, and access to justice and legal empowerment. She is a two-time Fulbright grantee to Chile and Spain.

At Aix-Marseille, Hilbink will be affiliated with the multidisciplinary research lab UMR-DICE at Sciences Po Aix, pursuing a collaborative project examining how, why, and with what consequences judges are responding to challenges to constitutional democracy from both the political left and right. Fluent in French, she moved alongside her husband, environmental data scientist James Gerber, also a University of Minnesota researcher. The couple, married 23 years, have relocated abroad several times during past sabbaticals.